Type on Maps: All the Little Things that Actually MatterElaine Guidero, Penn StateType on maps: just slap on some Arial for your labels (Times New Roman italic for the rivers) and call it a day, right? Wrong! Find out what your choice of type actually says about you. Okay, maybe it doesn't say a whole lot about you, but typefaces are full of designed details (called "microaesthetics") that, together, make a graphic statement and influence the semantic effect, or "feel," of a map. In this session, I present the initial results of my dissertation project, an in-depth survey about cartographic typography intended to reveal similarities and differences between typefaces due to microaesthetics. I'll discuss the nature of microaesthetics, and how to look for them and take them into account when choosing typefaces.
https://speakerdeck.com/nvkelso/type-on-maps-all-the-little-things-that-actually-matterEvery Pixel Counts: Web Map Symbols for the National Park ServiceJake Coolidge, Colorado State University/National Park ServiceClear, legible symbols are essential for any map depicting many features simultaneously. The National Park Service has a long tradition of building a coherent, visually related set of pictographic symbols that highlight a wide variety of visitor amenities and features within the system. This talk will focus in particular on the efforts of NPMap, the web mapping team for the NPS, to adapt these pictographic symbols for use in web maps. As we do so, we encounter new possibilities and challenges unique to this medium. Special design considerations and modifications have to be made to assure both legibility and visual balance with our basemaps, while providing map users with an immediate window into Places, our ever-improving geospatial database of NPS features. This presentation will provide an overview of our efforts to date, discuss upcoming design directions, and hopefully benefit any cartographer engaged in creating custom web map symbols.
http://www.nps.gov/npmap/slides/every-pixel-counts.pdfVisualizing Ten Years of Quantitative Color SchemesTravis White, University of Kansas Terry Slocum, University of Kansas Dave McDermott, Haskell Indian Nations UniversityThis presentation reports on color usage in quantitative thematic mapping, drawing examples from eight geographical journals over a ten-year period. We systematically reviewed over 400 maps to assess the quality and appropriateness of their respective color schemes, and to identify any persistent or emerging trends. Notably, we found that color hue and lightness have supplanted all other visual variables as the principal method of representing quantitative data on thematic maps. This presentation visualizes many of the trends and key findings from our review, emphasizing the specific color schemes used to represent classed quantitative data. We will also discuss our procedures for cataloguing, evaluating, and visualizing each scheme.
https://speakerdeck.com/nvkelso/visualizing-ten-years-of-quantitative-color-schemesNatural-Color Maps via Automated Coloring of Bivariate Grid DataJane Darbyshire, Oregon State UniversityBernhard Jenny, Oregon State UniversityThe creation of natural-color maps requires many steps, a significant time investment, and fairly detailed digital land cover information, which makes this technique impossible to apply to global web maps at medium and large scales. This study takes the first step in automating the creation of medium- and large-scale natural-color web maps by presenting a coloring method based on two grid inputs. We introduce an algorithmic method and prototype software for creating large-scale web maps with this technique. The software allows map authors to interactively assign colors and design the appearance of the map in an automated way, and generates web map tiles at a global level for medium and large scales.
http://terraincartography.com/pyramidshader
